News

This is the bright candlelit room where the life-timers are
stored—shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every
living person, pouring their fine sand from the future into the past.
The accumulated hiss of the falling grains makes the room roar like
the sea.
This is the owner of the room, stalking through it with a preoccupied air.
His name is Death.
But not any Death. This is the Death whose particular sphere of
operations is, well, not a sphere at all, but the Discworld, which is
flat and rides on the back of four giant elephants who stand on the
shell of the enormous star turtle Great A’Tuin, and which is bounded by
a waterfall that cascades endlessly into space.
Scientists have calculated that the chance of anything so patently
absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine
times out of ten.
-- "Mort", GNU Terry Pratchett

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 7.2.0,
also known as "Blue-crowned racquet-tail". Parrot
is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages. The blue-crowned racket-tail (Prioniturus discurus) is a parrot found on all the larger islands of the Philippines not starting with "P".

We detected and fixed two serious and two minor bugs which required a 7.0.1 hotfix release.

- GC regression --optimize caused by PARROT_CANNOT_RETURN_NULL, which
was visible on machines with low memory.
https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1186
This causes segfaults with --optimize, which is the default for nqp
and rakudo, on better (i.e. newer) compilers. The bug was there since
3.6, but turned evil only with 7.0, when packfile got refactored.
- threads deadlock in gc_gms_mark_and_sweep()
https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1187
With cc -O3 the lock code is too far away from the guard, thus causing
our threads example examples/threads/chameneos.pbc to hang, a
regression from 6.11.0

And 2 minor ones for --m=64 or --m=32:

- fix --m=64 with gcc on ppc64 and mips64 #1181,
--m=64 produced wrong ld and linkflags since 6.10, GH #1110
- fix icu probes with --m #1182
We never linked icu again the libs in the configure step, so we failed
to detect wrong architectures, and worse, added wrong arch include and
libpaths to the flags (e.g. amd64 --m=32), causing all sorts of icu
errors, when has_icu=1 but either linking or runtime failed. This
always caused problems.

"We'll show him! We'll show them *all*!"
"Okay," said Susan, "that was *definitely* evil -"
"No," said Lavender, "that's a Chaos Legion motto, actually. Only she
didn't do the insane laughter."
"That's right," Tracey said, her voice low and grim. "This time I'm not
laughing." The girl went on stalking through the corridor, like she had
dramatic music accompanying her that only she could hear.
(Hermione was starting to worry about what *exactly* the impressionable
youths of the Chaos Legion were learning from Harry Potter.)
-- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
http://hpmor.com/ chapter/70

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 7.0.0,
also known as "Crimson Shining Parrot". Parrot
is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Now instead of four in the eights place
You've got three,
'Cause you added one,
That is to say, eight, to the two,
But you can't take seven from three,
So you look at the sixty-fours...
Sixty-four? "How did sixty-four get into it?" I hear you cry!
Well, sixty-four is eight squared, don't you see?
-- Tom Lehrer, "New Math"
(Which starts in decimal, but ends in octal)

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 6.10.0,
also known as "New Caledonian lorikeet".

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce the new supported release Parrot 6.9.0, also known as "Rosy-faced Lovebird". Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.The name Lovebird stems from the parrots' strong, monogamous pair bonding and the long periods which paired birds spend sitting together. Lovebirds live in small flocks and eat fruit, vegetables, grasses and seed.

Lories and lorikeets (tribe Lorini) are small to medium-sized arboreal
parrots characterized by their specialized brush-tipped tongues for feeding
on nectar of various blossoms and soft fruits, preferably berries.
-- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lories_and_lorikeets
(Parrots that eat like hummingbirds!)

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 6.8.0,
also known as "Little Lorikeet". Parrot
is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

- Build
+ pbc_to_exe created executables use now the absolute execname on most platforms
and not only argv[0] which needs to be looked up in the path. [GH #1088]
- Documentation
+ Fix various new podchecker syntax errors with the new Pod::Simple 3.28
- Tests
+ Update embedded Pod::Simple to 3.28 to fix the missing whiteline_handler method
from non-embedded podchecker [GH #1089]
+ Skip 3 crashing codingstd tests with 5.8 DEBUGGING [GH #1090]